Crystaliron Invented For Real?

[fiat_knox]

Just spotted this news article on the BBC's website today:-

Could this be the real Crystaliron armour?

"Scientists from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) have devised an ultra-hard vehicle armour to protect military personnel.

Details of the steel armour, called Super Bainite, were outlined during a seminar at the University of Cambridge ..."

More on their website.

 

[Magnus von Thornwood]

Sweet!

Nice post dude, most informative and useful....

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Unexpectedly, the MoD team has given the armour a protective advantage by introducing holes into it.
According to scientist Professor Peter Brown, these perforations help deflect incoming projectiles. "I wouldn't like to have been the first person to have suggested that," said Professor Brown, from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

There's actually a short story about someone who, after struggling to tear a cheque along the perforation, makes an indestructable armour made entirely out of perforations...

 

[Andrew Boulton]

No, it was toilet paper. "It Was Nothing—Really!" by Theodore Sturgeon.

 

[saundby]

The processes they describe in the article are new, the materials themselves aren't new. Nor is a perforated armor layer. Nice to have the UK develop an armor plate industry again, I hope there's work for them.

 

[fiat_knox]

I can't speak to this armour's ability to maintain hull integrity in spacegoing and maritime vessels, though ...

 

[saundby]

Well, gravitics would certainly change a lot of elements of spacecraft design. First of all, hang the weight, if it costs extra to lighten then don't bother.

We've already got a lot of cool materials like this. Many times they don't get used because they introduce problems that make the material with the better specs not as good a solution overall as something that's cheaper to work and does the job almost as well, or that all the processes have already been worked out on, or whatever.

A lot of technical advance is just figuring out how to make stuff we already have in hand more usable, so that it can actually be applied to real world applications built and maintained by non-superhumans with realistic budgets.

The advances cited in the article are significant.Steps like these bring the more extreme substances closer to regular use. And they also get applied to other materials in other areas.

I've been lucky enough to take part in some projects where we tried out some of the far out materials to see if we could use them in actual designs. There are some really nifty materials already in the catalogs. But they've all got their gotchas.

As an example, I ran into trouble once when I got hungry for specs and tried to use an aluminum with better strength and toughness for an application. I had a pair of units made up with the new stuff, the 7076T6 alloy, and the rest of the test lot made up with plain old 2024T4.

7076 isn't really even out there in terms of materials, but it still turned into a fiasco really quickly. Manufacturing the 7076 units took more effort than all the rest of the units (it was about two dozen total.) First we had to learn how to put a double curve into 7076 without destroying the material or our tooling. Then, once they were done they failed due to work-hardening long, long before any of the plain jane units showed any signs of wear.

Ya gotta try, but usually all you learn is there's a good reason everyone uses what everyone uses...

Then again, as some author (Terry Brooks?) has said, Sometimes the Magic Works.